What kind of animals may we eat?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

The canon supplies four answers to a single question, and they do not say the same thing. Genesis 1:29 puts both humans and animals on a strictly plant diet in the original order. Genesis 9:3, after the flood, grants Noah 'every moving thing that lives' as food. Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 then retract that universal grant for Israel, permitting only animals that both chew the cud and part the hoof, and barring the pig, camel, hare, hyrax, and a long catalogue of sea creatures, birds, and swarming things. Finally Mark 7:18-20 and Matthew 15:11 have Jesus declare that nothing entering a person from outside defiles, which Mark 7:19 glosses with the editorial clause 'thus he declared all foods clean.' Four mandates, four scopes.

Three framings sit on the table. Dispensationalists such as Charles Ryrie and Robert Saucy read a single progressive revelation across successive covenants — Edenic vegetarianism, the Noahic concession to meat, the Mosaic restriction marking Israel as a separated people, and Christian freedom under the New Covenant. This reading is internally coherent and answers why the rules differ by book. What it concedes, however, is exactly the skeptic's point: the rules change. 'Eat only plants' and 'eat anything that moves' are not one instruction, and naming the shift a covenantal stage-transition labels it rather than dissolving it.

From a historical-critical angle the rules differ because the authors differ. Genesis 1:29 is Priestly (P), an idealized portrait of a peaceable original order in which no creature kills — a vision echoed in the eschatological peaceable kingdom of Isaiah 11. P then accounts for real-world meat-eating with the post-flood grant of Genesis 9:3, hedged immediately by the blood prohibition (9:4) — P softening its own ideal while introducing the first dietary limit. The kashrut of Leviticus 11 belongs to Priestly and Holiness Code material doing systematic purity work; Jacob Milgrom's Anchor Bible commentary traces how the distinctions function within P's holiness logic, tying the permitted/forbidden taxonomy to Israel's vocation to 'be holy' (Lev 11:44-45), and Mary Douglas read the clean/unclean taxonomy as a system policing categorical boundaries — animals that do not conform to their class's defining locomotion or anatomy are anomalous and therefore impure. Deuteronomy 14 is a parallel but not identical list from the Deuteronomic tradition; its catalogue of named clean game animals (Deut 14:4-5) has no counterpart in Leviticus 11, a divergence that itself signals separate hands working the same body of food law.

The Markan declaration is, by near-universal critical consensus, a Markan gloss. Joel Marcus is explicit that the participial clause 'cleansing all foods' (katharizon panta ta bromata) is the evangelist's editorial aside, not a quotation of the historical Jesus; Marcus also observes that Matthew, working from Mark, lacks the clause at the parallel point (Matt 15:17-20). Davies and Allison's ICC commentary on Matthew likewise treats Matthew's reworking of the pericope as deliberately retaining a more Torah-positive frame. Critics widely note this omission, and it is plausibly — though not as a matter of consensus certainty — connected to a more Torah-conservative redactional tendency in Matthew, a Gospel elsewhere notable for retaining Jesus' affirmation that not one stroke of the law will pass away (Matt 5:17-19). Jonathan Klawans sharpens the matter through the distinction between moral and ritual impurity: the dispute in Mark 7 concerns handwashing and the priority of moral defilement, not the abrogation of the kosher categories themselves. The historical Jesus argues that what comes out of a person defiles more than what goes in; the Markan community, writing decades later for a mixed Gentile audience, universalized the saying into a cancellation of food law.

Bart Ehrman's narrative argument is forceful here. Had Jesus actually abolished kosher law during his ministry, the Acts narratives become difficult to read: Peter would not need a threefold rooftop vision (Acts 10) to be persuaded that no food is unclean — and would not protest 'I have never eaten anything profane or unclean' (10:14) — and the Jerusalem council (Acts 15) would have no live dispute to resolve. The early church plainly did not remember Jesus having settled the food question; the very persistence of the controversy is evidence that the Markan gloss is a later interpretive development rather than a remembered ruling. This argument depends on taking Luke-Acts as preserving genuine memory of the early Jerusalem community's practice, which is itself a reconstruction, but it is a well-grounded one: the food-law controversy is independently attested in Paul (Gal 2:11-14; Rom 14), confirming that the question remained open across the first Christian generation.

The harmonization works theologically for a reader already committed to progressive revelation; it partially resolves the canonical tension by supplying a coherent storyline in which each mandate belongs to its own covenantal epoch. The source-critical reading is more parsimonious, explaining the divergences — and the editorial seam in Mark 7:19 — without retrojecting a covenantal scaffold. The evidence points to multiple authors working out food law across centuries, not a single divine menu dispensed in stages.

Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable as theology, genuine diversity of sources as history.